Still House Group, Bru(s) (Installation View), via Galerie Rodolphe Janssen

The Belgian Galerie Rodolphe Janssen is currently presenting a show focusing on the diverse output and extended vocabulary of The Still House Group collective of artists based in Red Hook, New York.   A small, yet varied show, the show allows common thematic elements to jut out from vastly different aesthetics and media, showcasing the group’s common practice and shared techniques of production.

Still House Group, Bru(s) (Installation View), via Galerie Rodolphe Janssen

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The New York Times has published a profile on Bivouac NY, a rooftop camping project created by artist Thomas Stevenson in East Williamsburg.  Welcoming visitors onto his roof for a night of food, drinks and views of the New York skyline from canvas tents, the experiment has created an aura of rustic withdrawal within city limits.  “When given the opportunity to pay attention to other people and commune with each other, folks just seem to do it,” Stevenson said. “That was a nice surprise.” (more…)

David Hockney, The Jugglers, June 24th 2012 (detail), (2012), © David Hockney, Via Hockney Pictures and Pace Gallery

The Jugglers, June 24th 2012 (2012), the U.S. premiere of artist David Hockney’s first video installation, presents a panorama of bright color and whirling objects, tinged with mordant humor. In a darkened room on the second floor of the Whitney, the viewer will find a bare theater with a single long bench and eighteen screens arranged in a grid. The screens switch on to reveal a composition of red and blue horizontal blocks almost as flat as Hockney’s early acrylics. Also bearing similarities to his Polaroid collages, Hockney has chosen to create a fractured composition using video to achieve the same effect by combining feeds from eighteen different cameras mounted in his Yorkshire studio on a sunny day. The light is even and saturates the space, permitting no highlights or shadows, and without figures, the red and blue studio looks relatively seamless on the screen. (more…)

Harlem’s Studio Museum has announced its 2013-2014 artists in residence.  The museum selected sculptor Kevin Beasley, chalk artist and conceptualist Bethany Collins and installation artist Abigail Deville. Each artist will receive $20,000 as part of their fellowship, an additional $1,000 for art materials, and studio space on the museum’s third floor for a full 12 months, culminating in a group show at the end of their stay. (more…)

Jeffrey Deitch will once again exhibit in New York, the New York Times reports.  The current curator of MOCA has announced a soon to open show at Leila Heller Gallery in Chelsea, focusing on the intersections of graffiti and calligraphies in contemporary art.  Opening September 5th, Calligraffiti: 1984-2013 will feature work from over 50 artists, including Basquiat, Haring, Shirin Neshat, an eL Seed.  ”Graffiti has become an important part of the imagery that has defined the Arab Spring.”  Deitch writes in the catalog.  “Today new communications platforms like Instagram and YouTube have given street art a new resonance.” (more…)

New arrests are expected in the ongoing investigation into the Knoedler Gallery, the New York Times reports.  The news comes after the indictment of dealer Glafira Rosales, in which the prosecuting attorney, Jason P. Hernandez, stated that he was contemplating further arrests.  The news comes after the announcement that Mr. Pei-Shen Qian, the artist who created these works, has left the country for China.  Both the prosecutor and defense attorney in the trial have also forecasted that the case will be resolved soon.  (more…)

Pat Steir, Last Wave Painting: Wave Becoming a Waterfall (1987-88), via Cheim and Read

The 1980’s have long been marked for their resurgent focus on the painted canvas.  Led by a dynamic group of New York artists, and a supportive system of gallerists and collectors, the decade saw an explosive body of work emerge that blended expressive technique with a new vision towards abstraction and figuration, breathing new life into a medium many were labeling dead in the water.

Carroll Dunham, Horizontal Bands (1982), via Daniel Creahan for Art Observed (more…)

Monika Grzymala, Volumen (2013), via Daniel Creahan for ArtObserved

Currently installed on the ground floor of The Morgan Library and Museum in midtown Manhattan, Monika Grzymala’s Volumen is an impressive flurry of paper and string, flowing up from a corner of the museum’s glass atrium, and spreading out as it flows upwards towards the ceiling.  Part of the museum’s annual “Summer Sculpture Series,” the piece forms an illusively rich tapestry of colors, mixing homemade paper with copied texts from the museum’s vast collections of manuscripts and books. (more…)

James Meyer, an assistant to Jasper Johns, who worked for the artist for over 27 years, was arrested on Wednesday, accused of stealing at least 22 unfinished works from his employer, and selling them through an unnamed New York gallery for over $6 million. Meyers was arraigned in a Hartford courtroom, and pleaded not guilty to the charges.  He was released on an unsecured $250,000 bond.  “Jasper has taught me to think about what I’m making before I make it.” Meyer once said of his employer and mentor. (more…)

Ellsworth Kelly,  Chatham I White Black (1971), Courtesy of MoMA

Coming off the wide success of his early experiments in shaped canvases, pure color fields and architectural investigations in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, artist Ellsworth Kelly withdrew from the New York City art world that had helped him attain such a high degree of success, settling in the upstate villa of Spencertown.  It was here, painting at a rented studio in nearby Chatham, that the artist would begin a new series of works that would help develop and refine his artistic practice to a fine point.

Ellsworth Kelly,  Chatham XII Yellow Black (1971), Courtesy of MoMA (more…)

“Art Within One Mile,” a new project by artist Bundith Phunsombatlert, has made its debut on New York City Streets.  Aiming to increase New Yorker’s awareness of art around the city, the series of taxicab yellow signs directs pedestrian’s attention to nearby sculptures and murals.  “It’s a form of generosity, a gesture toward an environment, like New York, that’s rich in a way that sometimes we take for granted,” says Prerana Reddy of the Queens Museum. “It’s a way of recuperating our hidden heritage, our hidden richness.” (more…)

Paul Klee, New Harmony (Neue Harmonie) (1936), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 71.1960. © 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

On view at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, is a unique exhibition of abstract works taken from the museum’s 20th century collection, intended to show the trends present between the years of 1919 and 1939, during which time a variety of abstract artists flourished, pioneering new techniques and creative philosophies across the mediums of painting, sculpture and drawing.

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Dealer Glafira Rosales, who was being held without bail in New York in connection with the sale of dozens of forged and fake paintings claimed to be works by Rothko, Pollack and Motherwell, was released from prison Monday under new bail terms.  A federal court in Manhattan set the new terms at $2.5 million, with $250,000 cash and four properties, which were promptly paid by the dealer.  Under the terms, Rosales is also prohibited from leaving the state, and will be monitored electronically. (more…)

For the first time in 25 years, MoMA’s PS1 campus will play host to a full-building retrospective, focusing on the work of the late Mike Kelley this October.  The retrospective first debuted at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam last year, featuring over 200 works from Kelley’s body of work. (more…)

Allan Sekula, the multimedia artist and former recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, has passed away at the age of 62.  Working across disciplines, Sekula produced a diverse and challenging body of work that included film, installation and photography (his most recognized work), often generating texts alongside the work that helped to further investigations into the media he utilized.  His work has shown at the Tate Modern, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and MoMA, among others.  His death comes just days after MoMA announced the acquisition of his seminal Fish Story series. (more…)

New York’s popular Performa biennial has announced the commissions for this year’s edition of the festival, including new works by Jake and Dinos Chapman, Subodh Gupta, Marianne Vitale, Raqs Media Collective, Ryan McNamara, and Pawel Althamer, among many others.  Centered around a loose theme of “citizenship,” the festival will also feature a special segment on black performance at the Studio Museum in Harlem, as well as the Grey Art Gallery at NYU.  “We have a thrilling line-up of new work this year,” said Director and Curator, RoseLee Goldberg, “showing that more and more visual artists consider performance an important medium for expressing their ideas, and that cultural institutions now appreciate performance for its communicability to a broad public and as essential to their programs.”  (more…)

A recent article in the New York Times investigates the growing trend towards museum exhibitions and spaces that prioritize experience and interaction over the quiet reflection and observation of more traditional art environments.  Exploring various approaches, including interactive installations, games, parties, interactive displays and social networking, museums are seeking ways to reposition themselves in a broader creative economy. (more…)

Akio Suzuki, Ku (detail) (2012), via Lisa Cooley

The field of sound art, as trumpeted by the New York Times and the Museum of Modern Art, is currently emerging into the mainstream dialogues of the high art world, exposing what was once seen as a relatively underground practice to the milling crowds of major museums.  Even so, with that sort of focus placed on the medium, a new level of critique, or rather, a reassessment of the techniques, practices and processes inherent in the creation of sound art.

The String and The Mirror (Installation View), via Lisa Cooley (more…)

James Turrell, Aten Reign (2013) (Installation View) © James Turrell, Photo: David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York

The highly anticipated James Turrell exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, which opened last month, and remains on view through the summer, has renewed the ongoing debate surrounding contemporary artworks of Disney-esque proportions, especially considering whether or not these spectacle-inducing affairs are worthy of the attention they often command. Like his ongoing work-in-progress, Rodin Crater (a massive naked-eye observatory built within an ancient crater near Flagstaff, Arizona), Turrell’s multi-venue comeback is not exactly a modest undertaking, with concurrent exhibitions on view at The Los Angeles County Museum of Art and The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. At the Guggenheim, Turrell joins Matthew Barney, Nam June Paik, Maurizio Cattelan, and others who have mediated Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic rotunda through Turrell’s site specific Aten Reign, which uses an ingenious system of stretched fabrics and LED lights to create the illusion of billowing clouds of color that unfold in concentric rings through the rising levels, with visitors invited to watch the dizzying light show from the rotunda floor. Four other historical projected light works, three of which date to the 1960s, are also on view in adjacent galleries along with a selection of thirteen aquatints that, with expert lighting and position, appear to emit a soft glow. However, it is Aten Reign that has generated the most buzz, both good and bad.

James Turrell, Aten Reign (2013) (Installation View) © James Turrell, Photo: David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York  (more…)

The Museum of Modern Art has announced a new initiative, in conjunction with blogging platform Tumblr, to engage younger internet users and introduce them to art through education and exposure.  The project, titled MoMA Teens, was launched on Monday after nine months of work.   “Museums can be very intimidating at times,” Says MoMA’s associate educator Calder Zwicky said.  “The idea was to meet teens where they already are, and it seemed like Tumblr was the platform to use.” (more…)

After the monumental damages to New York’s art world caused last year by Superstorm Sandy, which some estimate between $200 and $300 million, Art Insurance firms are feeling the pressure to adjust their policies.  Many firms are subtly adjusting their underwriting agreements, taking into account newly redrawn flood maps and the risks of subterranean storage as part of policy coverage as factors in the coverage of high-value artworks.  “Sandy was a wake-up call,” says Christiane Fischer, president and CEO of AXA Art Insurance. “People are much more aware of how much New York is in the path of hurricanes.”  (more…)

The Unicorn in Captivity (1495-1505), Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The word Manhattan conjures images of glass and concrete skyscrapers, bustling streets, and the sounds of honking cars, but a trip to the Cloisters, the evocatively monastic outpost of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, located on the Hudson river vallery, truly transports visitors away from the urban metropolis.  Visitors enter a space of leafy pathways, stone arches, stained glass, hushed hallways, and intricate courtyards. seemingly more at home in the serene South of France than cacophonous Manhattan.

Unicorn Aquamanile from Germany (1425–50), via The Metropolitan Museum of Art (more…)

Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art, the first planned location for a traveling retrospective of the work of Jeff Koons, has announced that it will no longer be hosting the show.  The news comes in the wake of Director Jeffrey Deitch’s resignation from his position.  The exhibition will now open in New York at The Whitney Museum in June of next year. “It was decided by MOCA and the Whitney that it would be better for an exhibition as complex and ambitious at this one to be developed over a longer period of time,” said Whitney spokesman Stephen Soba. “And that the show should open in June in New York.”  (more…)

Edward Hopper, Study for Nighthawks, (1941 or 1942), via The Whitney

An Edward Hopper painting inevitably leads the viewer to contemplation of the meaning and purpose of the simple and mundane moments that make up the majority of our lives. His scenes depict the usual, the all-too-familiar, and even the occasional melancholy moments of existence.  Empty gas stations, coffee shops, movie theaters, and bedrooms communicate the paradoxical isolation of American society;  while many of the inhabitants are depicted in social settings, in crowds or social establishments, they convey overwhelming feelings of remorse, isolation and resignation. Through his brushstrokes and pencil marks, Hopper provides a commentary on the American life of mid-20^th century, a commentary that is in many cases still applicable to the America of today.

Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, (1942), via The Whitney (more…)